


All Beaten Mariners

by onstraysod



Category: Bloodline (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fantasy, Polyamory, Romance and mythology and weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 23:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9852638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: Danny Rayburn takes the boat out at night, on the edge of a tropical storm. He doesn't return.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ennaih](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ennaih).



> Title and preface taken from "The Sirens' Song" by William Browne of Tavistock (1588-1643)

_Fear not your ships,_  
_Nor any to oppose you save our lips;_  
_But come on shore,_  
_Where no joy dies till Love hath gotten more._

***

The weatherman on the t.v. above the bar kept blabbering on about what a near miss it had been, and Danny was tired of hearing his voice. Rising from his stool, he ground his cigarette out in the ashtray and drained the last of his whiskey.

"I always suspected you were crazy," Eric said, shaking his head as he watched Danny fish for the keys to his pick-up in the pocket of his jeans. "But now I know you're fucking insane."

"Why's that?"

"Have you seen what's on t.v.?" Eric pointed at the satellite image filling the screen, the thick wisp of white snarling up the Straits of Florida and around the Sargasso Sea like a serpent. "That's a fucking tropical storm, Danny, and you're going to take the boat out? At night? In a fucking tropical storm?"

"It's passed us by," Danny said, patting his pockets to find his pack of cigarettes. "A little rain, a few choppy waves. Nothing I haven't sailed through before."

"Jesus." Eric shook his head and beckoned over the bartender to refill his glass. "You're asking for it this time, man. Haven't you ever heard the stories about what happens when people go out on the water after hurricanes and tropical storms have passed through? Lightning on the ocean and red skies and falling stars and winds pushing boats off to fuck knows where."

Danny laughed. "You don't believe that bullshit, do you?"

"Hell yeah I believe it. Hey, maybe you've been away too long but I've spent my whole fucking life here and I have seen some weird shit. No way I'd go out on the ocean tonight. No fucking way."

Danny dug a few dollars from his pocket, threw them down on the bar. "Yeah, well... I’ll send you a postcard from the Bermuda Triangle."

"This is no laughing matter, Danny, fuck you," Eric growled. "You ever seen those old maps, the ones they made before they even knew the world was round or some shit like that? The ones with those fuck ugly sea creatures on the margins, dragons with tentacles coming out of their eyes and shit? _Here be monsters_ , they always say. Well that's where you're headed, Danny. You go out on the ocean on the tail of a tropical storm and the monsters will fuck you up."

Danny grinned as he pulled another cigarette out of the pack with his lips and let it dangle. "I'm not scared. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Cause I'm the fucking monster, Eric. I'm the only one there is."

***

And occasionally, he actually believed that.

But what he really knew himself to be was blood in the water. Always had been. Still was. And the sharks were circling: John. Meg. Kevin. Coming in close to finish him, silence him. Any minute now their eyes would go white and they’d start rolling, ripping him to shreds.

Except now he'd filed his teeth to sharp points. He was lean and hungry. And when the sharks closed in to bite, he was ready to bite back. He'd already started to nibble, here and there, nipping at their weak spots, tearing off tender strips of rotten flesh. This time he'd see them go belly-up before they'd stop him from swimming.

Far out on the water at night, far enough that the lights of land winked out of existence like dying stars, he could sometimes find a tiny measure of peace. So he boarded the boat, started up the engine, and steered it northwest, into the Straits, chasing the storm. Out on the cradle of the sea he’d cut the engine, turn off the lights, lay back on the deck and count the stars. Try to imagine that, had they taken some other configuration, his life might have been a happy one.

There were two star charts pasted to the wall in the cabin, old ones, faded and tattered along their edges. One showed the night sky in the northern hemisphere, one the southern. He had almost memorized them by now, the strange names of their stars and constellations. As he steered that night, Danny’s glance chanced to fall on the southern one in the dim glow of a light over the windscreen, and he grinned. That was an idea. He could turn around, point the boat towards the pole, sail to fucking Tasmania, right around storm-lashed Cape Horn. Why not? He could handle himself on the water and if the waves took him down, well -- what did it really matter anymore?

He could sink down to the coral, fill his lungs with salt.

Just like she had.

Oh but they would love that, wouldn’t they? John and Meg and Kevin. Even his mother. He could see it all, as plain and vivid as memory. Dear Danny, wayward but beloved son and brother who’d made good at last, trying to sail solo around the world. What a loss to lose him in such a way and oh — _what a relief_. There’d be tears and toasts, John would make a speech, the local newspaper would be there to soak it all up, and they’d convince themselves that they really meant it, the Rayburns: fucking hypocrites all.

He wouldn’t let them off so easy.

When the last lights had blinked out in the distance, Danny lit a cigarette -- and grabbing a bottle of tequila from the cabinet where he’d stashed it -- settled himself down outside on the deck. The eastern horizon was lit with almost constant lightning strikes, crisscrossing one another and creating wild patterns on the ceiling of clouds above them, on the back of Danny’s eyes. It was odd, he thought with a twisted stab of bemusement, watching a storm in the distance, observing it rather than being battered by its winds, choking in its downpour. He was always in the midst of the cataclysm. He had never known a dry day, a calm and cloudless sky.

He remembered his mother telling him once that he’d been born on the edge of a storm. God had a shitty sense of humor, it seemed.

Echoes of thunder rolled over the waves though the storm must have been seventy miles distant, if not more, maybe as far as the Sargasso. The waters, churned choppy by its passage, slapped a discordant rhythm against the side of the boat. And there was something else too, another sound, almost like a single strain of music plucked out of a harmony and tossed out upon the water. A twisting, beguiling, undulating sound that put Danny in mind of a spectrum of color, hanging out there in the muggy air above the waves, gleaming and vibrating with some frequency of light made audible. 

He almost thought he could see it.

In the near distance it floated, a shimmering thread that changed from green to gold to blue to a shade of rose like the skyline on the edge of dawn. Danny sat up, squinted at it through the darkness, rubbed a hand across his eyes, and then it was gone: nothing there but the mirrored blackness of water and overcast sky, the distant splinters of lightning. But he could still hear it, the strange trilling sound, and as he listened it expanded: from a single tone it grew into something like a song. A song without words or melody. A song that sounded like a spectrum of color, that tasted like papaya and rum, that felt like longing. 

Laughing a little, Danny peered closely at the bottle of tequila in his hand. He could hold his liquor but maybe this particular brand was more potent than he’d thought.

Whales, maybe. Roused from their sleep in deep watery dens by the passage of the storm. But Danny had heard whales before. Whales didn’t sound like women keening in octaves no human throat could reach. Whale song didn’t cause the air to vibrate as if its very molecules had been shaken and rearranged. 

Whales couldn’t say his name.

_Danny._

The sound ran like cold water beneath his skin, down his spine. It was as clear as if it had been spoken into his ear by someone sitting mere inches away. Scrambling unsteadily to his feet, Danny spun around, but of course he was alone, nothing but the deck around him with its nets and empty coolers, nothing but the cabin at his back and the waves and the black nothingness of night on the sea. 

_Danny._

This time it came from the port side of the boat, from some distance out upon the water. Danny ran to the edge and peered out into the darkness, able to distinguish the tideline from the sky only by the faint gleam the bursts of distant lightning shot along the water. There was nothing there.

Except that strange, undulating spectrum of color, back again, shimmering gold and violet and coral green in the middle distance, in the space between disbelief and certainty. Spiraling, unfolding, beckoning like a warm touch, a glimmering lifeline.

Inhaling hard on his cigarette, Danny watched the spectrum, certain he was hallucinating it, oddly mesmerized nonetheless by his strange creation. But the voice, the song… He kept hearing it, at varying distances and volumes, feminine but utterly bizarre, sometimes hollow as if welling up from below the waves, sometimes a cacophony of tones passing through a thousand unknown octaves simultaneously. Of course he was imagining it, Danny knew this, knew this as sure as he tasted the nicotine from his cigarette, the sharp metallic burn of the tequila scraping its way to his gut. Yet he leaned towards it, towards the song and the unraveling ribbon of light, stared and listened and hoped for he knew not what, until his eyes watered with the strain and his head dipped and spun.

Fucking tequila.

The stuff had poisoned him. He threw the bottle over the side, hearing the soft plop as it hit the water. Somebody’s idea of a joke, maybe, or some moonshine bullshit passed off as the real deal. He wanted to stay on the deck, breath in the salt spray, watch the lightning chase its tail across the horizon, but with what the tequila had obviously done to him he didn't trust himself not to walk right overboard. The waters could get rough and he might tumble off the starboard side, be left half-conscious and dog-paddling while the boat moved on without him. He had to find a way to keep himself secure.

Beneath one of the seats in the cabin he found a short coil of rope and he took this out on the deck and wrapped it around his right wrist. Then he lashed his arm to the door of the cabin, looping the rope around the handle, pulling the knot firm. He left himself enough slack that he could put his arm down and he leaned back against the closed door and fished his pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt with his left, dominant hand. He could still hear the song, dancing off in the distance, but sleep was overtaking him. He’d let the boat and the tide and the smoke of his last cigarette take him where they would.

***

"Good morning, Danny.”

His eyes opened slowly, still too fast to prepare him for the brightness of the sun. It poured into his head before he could close his eyelids again, pain stabbing through his skull. Gingerly he opened them, letting the sunlight reach him by degrees. It was so bright, and the air around him so clear, that everything looked almost white until his sight began to adjust to the glare. Then color rushed back into the world, more vivid than he could ever remember having noticed before. Sapphire blue ocean and turquoise sky and the bleached white of the boat’s deck and the auburn tint of her hair.

Danny sat up, heart pounding painfully against his sternum.

A woman was sitting on the port edge of the boat, smiling at him and humming, a weird, discordant, off-key sound that wandered and dipped like the buzz of bumblebees. She was wet and she was working her fingers through her sodden auburn hair.

"Who the fuck are you?" he asked.

She laughed. “Someone who’s been waiting for you.”

He shook his head and went to rub his eyes with his right hand, then remembered that the length of rope still constrained him. Picking at the knot with his free hand, he kept his eye on the woman. “I don’t remember inviting you on board.”

“Don’t you?” She cocked her head to one side as she considered him, still raking her fingers through her hair. “I called to you and you answered. Not with words, maybe, but still — I heard you.”

Rising to his feet and rubbing his left wrist, Danny looked around for her boat, for whatever craft had anchored alongside and let her swim across to his deck. But there was no other boat, no yacht or dinghy or goddamn canoe, just the softly stirring blue abyss and the vague suggestion of an island too far away for her to have swam from: a mere smudge of green on the horizon. He turned again to question her but his query died in his throat, unspoken.

She was clad in a short white sheath, a flimsy garment that reached only as far as the tops of her thighs, and clinging to her wet skin it left virtually nothing to the imagination. He found himself staring at her breasts, his mouth beginning to water as he picked out her nipples, sharp and red beneath the cloth, and almost as if she knew his thoughts she arched her back, smiling as she displayed them more prominently to his gaze.

"Come swim with me, Danny," she said, and she swiveled around and slid over the side, slipping into the water with barely a sound. Turning, she gripped the edge of the deck and raised herself back up, facing him, just enough so that he could see her breasts again, the wet cloth hugging the heavy curve of them, and she licked her lips, holding his gaze, before letting herself fall back down into the water.

"Come on!" she called, and she swam a little distance away, turning in the water again to beckon him. 

He didn't act with any conscious thought. It just seemed right, seemed natural, to join her in the water: not dangerous, just right, like going back to the womb. A smile curled her wet red lips as Danny stripped, throwing his grey tank top and jeans and even his boxers down on the deck before diving in, surfacing a few feet away from her. He raised his hands to dash the water from his face, brush back the silvered hair from his temples.

"Doesn't it feel good, Danny?" the woman asked, pushing the water around with her arms, treading in place. It did feel good. Pleasantly cool beneath the brutal sun, soft and enfolding. Danny closed his eyes, let the sun's heat soak through his eyelids, and as he kicked his feet below him he felt the current slide around him, almost like a caress.

Exactly like a caress. It was stroking him, some ripple beneath the surface, some sinuous riptide, teasing him like a woman’s touch. It slide between his legs, his thighs, and tugged at him, and he felt the telltale tingling as his cock stiffened, roused by the lick of the water. The current sucked at him, hot and firm like a hand, wet and greedy like a mouth. Uncanny. But the woman was still feet away from him and the water was limpid: there was nothing around his body but water, clear as glass.

Heat was flooding his chest, his face, when the woman swam toward him. Without preamble she pressed herself against him, put her lips to his, and Danny licked at her mouth. Salt lined her lips like the rim of a margarita. She wrapped her arms around his neck, braced her feet on the back of his legs and raised herself so he could get to her breasts, her nipples: these were sweet like star apples and he bit at them through the sheer fabric of her wrap, bit and mouthed until she moaned. Then she sank down, spreading her legs, and Danny guided her onto his cock, blood thundering in his ears, water lapping up into his face as she locked her legs behind him and twisted and writhed down. He was already close to coming, aching to come, the sea itself having sucked him to the edge. She took his mouth with hers, her kiss violent and grazing, then reared up suddenly and pushed his head beneath the water.

"Stop it," he spat when he surfaced and she laughed, pushing herself harder down upon him and taking his mouth again. Her hand tangled in his hair and she gave another push against him, almost forcing him again beneath the waves. "I said stop it!" he growled, and he dug his hands into the soft flesh of her thighs, hard enough to hurt her, and he thrust savagely and deep: angry but too close, too blissfully close, to stop. The woman merely laughed again, laughed and moaned, and wrapping her arms more tightly around his neck, she kissed him once more.

And submerged them both together.

Water rushed into Danny's nose, spilled into his lungs. She had him in a vice grip: arms and legs and womanhood all, clutching him, sucking, holding. Down they sank, Danny struggling against her, to free himself and to fuck her, both at the same time. So this is what drowning feels like, he thought with what little spark of consciousness yet remained to him.

It felt incredible.

He was coming and dying, blood pounding behind his eyeballs, cock pulsing in the wet cave of her sex. His lungs were bursting, every muscle seizing as his cells perished and his seed blossomed in the water like a cloud. Darkness, auburn tinted - her hair, swirling against his face - and then true darkness, blackness, the blackness of the void, and he was smiling, could feel his lips pulled tightly open over his teeth, an expression of his sheer bliss.

Then he suffocated.

***

Except that he didn't. He was opening his eyes again, to the same bright sun, the same whitewashed sky. He breathed and his lungs expanded, filling with clean air scented by vegetation, by the nectar of dewy blooms, and he felt solid ground beneath his naked body, soft sand and the tideline tickling his toes.

"He's waking."

It was the woman with the auburn hair again, standing nearby, shin deep in the lapping waves. Danny struggled to sit up but couldn't quite make it, settled for leaning back on his elbows instead. He was on a beach shaded by palm trees, the ocean surging gently to shore with a lapping whisper. A few yards beyond the shallows, his boat sat in a lagoon, rocking almost imperceptibly upon the gentle waves.

Another woman approached him, walking over the sand, watching him with a lush mouth twisted in a bemused smile. Half of her dark hair was pulled back, worked into an intricate knotted braid that was dotted with tiny shells; the other half cascaded in soft curls over her shoulder. She was wrapped in a gauzy blue sarong that shimmered silver as she moved, her arms bare save for golden bands worked with swirling designs reminiscent of storm-tossed seas. Her dark eyes riveted him, held him, weighed and assessed him, all in the instant it took her to lower herself to the sand at his side.

"Welcome Danny."

"Where am I? "

"You're home," the woman in blue answered.

"This is the Keys?" he asked, his brain struggling to come back online, to process past and present and forge a connecting line between the two. 

"The Keys aren't your home, Danny," the woman chided him. "You should know that by now."

"How did I get here?" he asked, and he struggled up into a full sitting position, rubbing at his brow and eyes with the back of his hand, scattering sand over his face.

"We brought you here. The storm washed you here. You sailed here of your own accord. Maybe a little of all three. It doesn't matter how you came here," she told him. "You've always been meant to be here, and now you are."

"I don't understand--"

"You're home, Danny," the woman in blue said, and she put her fingertips to his lips to silence him, pushing them gently between. "That's all you need to understand, for now."

She leaned closer, stroking her hand down and over his chest, over his small, tight nipples, tracing the hard plane of his sternum and the muscles that hugged his ribs. Her fingertips drew a line that Danny fancied he could almost see as well as feel, a shimmer of color shifting through the visible spectrum, glowing like hot electric lines. She pushed him back down upon the sand and began to kiss him, her mouth like ripe cherries, her tongue smooth and skilled, and Danny kissed her back, for the moment unquestioning, content to feel rather than think.

As the woman in blue explored his mouth and caressed his chest, the one with the auburn-tinted hair approached and knelt beside his legs. Her hands stroked up and down his thighs and he was stiffening in the warm, balmy air, cock tickled by the light breeze off the water. He groaned into the woman in blue's mouth as the other fisted him, working him with a steady hand, and then both women were stroking him in turn, tugging him hand over hand until his back was arching against the sand and tears leaked from his eyes. Then the auburn-haired woman and the woman in blue exchanged places, the former capturing Danny's mouth, claiming his tongue, while the latter straddled him, her body warm and naked beneath the sarong, wet as the tide that lapped at his feet. Sinking down to impale herself on his stiff heat, she looked at him and smiled.

"Can't you feel it, Danny?" she asked as she rocked herself, both hands sliding up and down his chest, fingertips grazing his peaked nipples. "You belong here. With us. You always have. No one back there cares for you. No one back there loves you. Not as we can. Not as we do."

The auburn-haired woman licked his throat as Danny cried out, incoherent nonsense spilling from his lips as he fell deeper and deeper into an indescribable bliss. The tide washed over his feet and the sun dazzled in his eyes as his body convulsed, every last bit of pleasure drawn from him like water wrung from a cloth.

***

He wondered if he’d died.

That would explain it. If he’d drowned while swimming with the auburn-haired woman, or before that, riding the tail end of the storm. Maybe the waves had been stronger than he’d perceived, towering ship-swampers, and the boat had flipped and he’d been pushed down beneath it, pinned to the floor of the sea.

Maybe he was there still, hair stirred softly by a thermal vent, fish nibbling at his flesh.

If he was dead, Danny was quite certain this couldn’t be Hell. Or, if it was, then the sinners certainly were having a better time than the saints. As he had always suspected.

But he wasn’t dead and he knew this for several reasons. He needed to take a piss, he was starving, and he was in desperate need of a cigarette. Rising from the sand where the women had left him, raw and sated and coated with sand, he waded out through the shallows to the boat and hauled himself up on deck. His jeans were where he’d left them, wadded up on the port side, and he found his battered pack of smokes in the back pocket as he pulled them on. Throwing on his tank, he groped for his lighter and went into the cabin.

There was a map there, an old one, but he had a sneaking feeling its age wouldn’t matter. Unrolling it upon the table, his hands passed over the jutting leg of Florida, the negligent smear of the Keys, the reverse L of the Straits, a line of lighter blue between the emerald land and the midnight blue of the wild Atlantic. There was no GPS on board the boat, nothing but a battered compass, for it was meant to hug the shoreline, to navigate the shoals and mangrove swamps. But it hardly mattered. Danny was quite certain this island wasn’t one of the green flecks scattered like a broken necklace across the paper.

The edges of this map had neat white margins, degrees of latitude and longitude, the name of the company that had printed it in tiny letters running up and down. There were no humped serpents with lolling tongues, no horned whale-like monstrosities spewing froth from their blowholes, their tentacles wrapped around Spanish galleons. He remembered Eric’s words and he wadded up the map, throwing it into one corner of the cabin.

Worthless.

Switching on the radio, Danny listened for a signal. As he’d half expected there was nothing, not even static. His connection to the Keys, to the world, to his life prior to stepping on deck the night before - if it had been just the night before and not a thousand years previous - had been effectively severed.

He wasn’t entirely sure if he was sorry.

Picking up the discarded map, he left the cabin.

***

“What is this place?” he demanded, striding through the shallows, up to the part of the beach where the two women sat: the woman in blue on the sand, the auburn-haired woman on a saddle-like curve of a storm-twisted palm tree.

“An island,” the woman in blue said carelessly, lips twisting.

“No shit. But not one on this map, I’m guessing.”

He threw the ball of wadded paper at her and she watched it hit the sand a few inches away with an impassive eye, not reaching for it. Her glance was positively glowing with amusement.

“Maps are inexact things, don’t you think? Unreliable. How can something flat, one-dimensional, ever capture something as complex as the world?”

Danny stared at her for a moment, then tilted his head back slightly and laughed: a sound harsh even to his own ears, brittle with well-worn bitterness. “So wherever this may be, the official language spoken here is cryptic bullshit, is it?”

She shrugged. “Does it really matter? Where we are?”

“It’s kinda difficult to set a course for home when you don’t know where you’re sailing from.”

“But you’re already home, Danny,” the woman in blue said, tossing back her dark curls, the tiny shells in her braid chiming together. “And we want to keep you. It’s been many years since we’ve had such delicious sport.”

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” Danny growled, “but I’m nobody’s plaything.”

She laughed then, the woman in blue, loudly and joyfully, and she turned to glance at the other woman who was laughing too. “Really? Is that what you think? Oh Danny. We two could tease you and tickle you and wind you up and pull you about with a lead and you’d still be less of a plaything here than you’ve ever been before. All you are back there in the world is a plaything: it’s all you’ve ever been. Don’t you see? Life, fate, God. Society, the law. And especially your family.” She leaned up, fixing him with her sharp eyes. “Dear John and Meg and Kevin and Sally. And dear old Dad.” Her lips were cruel, red and curving. _“Go away, Danny. Come home, Danny. Do this, Danny. Go away again._ Backwards and forwards, pulled hither and yon, like the flag on the rope in a game of tug-of-war.”

Danny’s face was a rictus of opposing emotions; the blood drained out of him, leaving him dizzy. As the woman in blue had spoken these words her voice had changed and, like a ventriloquist, he’d heard John’s voice and Meg’s voice and his mother’s, issuing from her lips.

The woman in blue had risen to her feet and was drawing closer to him, dark eyes stabbing to hold him in place. “But if you stay here with us, Danny, you’ll finally be free.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” he said hoarsely. “About me. My life—“

“We know everything about you, Danny. Would you like to know how?” She raised her hand and touched his chest where it was bared by the scooped neck of the tank. “The stars have printed it all over your skin, your own secret zodiac.” She drew a line with her finger from freckle to freckle. “And I can read it all, as easily as you read a book.”

“You are right, Danny,” the auburn-haired woman said at last, “this island isn’t on any map. To keep some things beautiful and pure, they must be kept hidden.”

“So what are you saying?” Danny asked, trying to laugh, trying to let the absurdity of it all rouse his sarcasm, the bile that spilled so easily from his tongue. “That I’m supposed to believe this is some kind of fantasy island, some magic land made of fucking glass—“

“Why is that so difficult to believe?”

“Because there is no such thing as magic! Nobody knows that better than I do. It’s a crock, it’s bullshit, something for children to believe in—“

“All children except little Danny Rayburn,” the woman in blue said, pouting. “Little Danny Rayburn had the magic kicked out of him by his father, didn’t he?”

It was fear, not anger, that made him lash out, made him reach forward and grab the woman by the throat. But she didn’t flinch. Instead she laughed and reached up, touching his shoulder, curling her fingers into his flesh, a burrowing warmth sinking from her touch into the muscle, the bone, worming its way into the old injury.

The ache - for it always ached, it never stopped aching, it was a bad memory made flesh, with him wherever he went like an albatross haunting his steps - vanished instantly beneath her fingertips. “Let us heal you, Danny,” the woman in blue whispered, and he released his grip and dropped his hand, stunned into silence. Reaching up with the opposite hand, he touched his shoulder, kneaded it, and felt nothing: nothing but smooth skin and hard bone and soft, elastic flesh. He straightened his back, for the first time in years maybe, no longer needing to slouch and cower beneath the weight of the pain.

She held out her hand, an invitation. And Danny took it.

***

They lived in a sprawling dwelling of wood and stone, less a house than an extension of the surrounding rainforest, the beauty of nature shaped and refined. Open walkways carpeted with leaves led from one room to another; none had walls, only the occasional fluttering drapery of sheer cloth or ropes of woven vines obscured the view. Censers of incense hung from the ceilings and bright tropical birds flitted in and out, giving raucous calls or whistling soft melodies. There were low couches, cushions and pillows covered in damask and silk, and to these the women led Danny as the sun began to sink beneath the waves. They stripped him naked again and laid him down on the soft cushions, and moving around each other they kissed him, every inch of him warmed, licked, and tasted by mouths that were ever moving, ever wet. If his freckles were the stars that shaped his life then the women devoured his fate, rearranging his cosmos on the tips of their tongues. When it was done they fed him, propping his head on pillows, bringing glistening slices of passion fruit to his lips, tearing off the flesh of the mango, the soursop, and delivering it up to him with their mouths. Danny washed it all down with earthen bowls filled with wine, and for dessert: the sweet cream of the women themselves, which Danny stole with relish. 

“What are your names?” he asked afterwards, laying in the arms of the woman in blue while the auburn-haired one perched on the open edge of the room, gazing up at the stars. Night had come to the unnamed, uncharted island, and with it the sounds of the rainforest, a thousand organic voices raised in a thousand different songs.

“What would you like to call us?” the woman in blue asked, ruffling the curls at his nape with her fingers.

Because it was night, because the stars could be seen glistening through the canopy of palms, Danny thought of the star charts in the boat’s cabin, the exotic names of the constellations that hung in the northern and southern skies.

“You’re Auriga,” he told the auburn-haired woman. And turning to the woman in blue he said: “And you I’ll call Vela.”

***

Auriga was part of the northern hemisphere, for she was colder than her counterpart, more distant and aloof. She could make love to Danny, ardent and possessive, then disappear into the forest for days, returning one dawn without a word of explanation. She would often sit in the crook of a palm, chin on her bare knees, and stare out at the ocean for hours, the sea breeze stirring her hair, dark eyes intense on the distant vanishing point between ocean and sky. Once when Danny asked Vela what it was Auriga thought about in these moments, she answered: “She dreams of other worlds, circling other stars.”

Vela was warmer, passionate, her blood hot and her tongue sharp and clever. She was of the southern hemisphere and it was her touch that became as familiar to Danny as his own skin, her mouth he tasted in his dreams. They slept together, their naked bodies curved into one shape, the night breeze lifting the heat of copulation off their pressed flesh, and they swam together in the lagoon or a nearby pool of spring-fed water, circling like sharks until one or the other made the first move. Then Danny would grasp her and pull her legs around him, or she would push him back against the bank and ride him until a kind of delirium settled over him, a mindless hum of colored energy pulsing through his body, cleaving present from past until pain of every kind was nothing but a vague and distant memory.

“Has it always been just the two of you here?” Danny asked one afternoon, laying in a hammock made from an old fishing net, Vela cradled in his arms.

“No, not always. There have been other visitors, like you. Sailors whose ships were blown off course in a storm. Intrepid explorers who chose the wrong path on some outdated map. We have always been most eager for the company.”

“And these visitors, these sailors?” Danny asked with a sly, sharp-toothed grin. “How exactly did they pay for the hospitality you showed them?”

Vela smiled and let the obvious answer hang in the balmy air between them. “Every man has a gift to share. Some could mend nets, some could build, some could fish. Some could rig sails, work wood or stone with axes or chisels, write poetry. Each left some part of himself behind.”

“And what happened to them? These men?”

“They left, as all men eventually do.” Vela sighed. “All too brief is the flame of a man. In an instant it fades and never returns.”

Did he have a skill to share, besides the skill of fucking up? Danny wondered. Yes, of course he did.

***

He began cooking for them. 

The kitchen, such as it was, was equipped with little more than a brick oven, heated by kindling a fire in an alcove beneath its stones, but of ingredients to work with Danny found no lack. Wide stone basins brimmed with vegetables and fruit, replenished daily: guava and pomerac, noni, lemons and limes, breadfruit, cassava, and lush plantains. There were savory greens and sweet blooms and shelves of spices and oils. There was wine, too, and rum and brandy, some in bottles crusted with mineral deposits, as if the spirits inside had aged on the bottom of the sea. And there were fish in abundance — the red-skinned hogfish, snappers and groupers, sea bass and the sleek swordfish — snared in netted traps in the lagoon where his boat was anchored. Every morning he hauled in the night’s catch, using his creativity to pair the choicest catches with the right fruits and spices.

A routine formed organically over the days, the weeks, however long it had been since he’d dived off the boat into Auriga’s arms. They breakfasted on fruit and bathed in the clear spring water of the pool not far from the dwelling. Danny would bring in the catch from the fish traps, plan out the evening meal, and the long, steamy hours of afternoon would be spent in lovemaking, in finding new ways to intwine their bodies and chase the delicious poison of ecstasy.

Then Danny would serve the women he’d named after constellations, and the three of them would dine and drink, retiring afterwards to one of the soft-pillowed rooms where he would take one or the other, or sometimes the woman would pleasure him, consulting together on their amorous stratagems in mischievous whispers, smiling and laughing at him, their lips glistening with wine and the anticipation of sin. They would massage his flesh with fragrant elixirs or tease him with fans made of parrot feathers, or most often they would bind his hands with silken chords and bare his body. And while one used mouth and tongue to torture him with bliss, the other would sing: that strange, wavering un-melody, that blend of hollow whale song and erotic keening, an echo of some ancient, primal lullaby heard in Atlantis before its drowning.

***

In a ridge of volcanic rock some distance from their dwelling was a cave, its mouth draped with hanging vines. 

“What’s in there?” Danny asked one day, having spied it for the first time.

“The past,” Vela told him.

Wasn’t he always colliding with the past? How many times had Sarah’s voice drawn him backwards, the present falling away beneath his feet? Late one afternoon, therefore, when Vela and Auriga had gone down to the lagoon, Danny did what he always felt compelled to do.

He went into the past.

***

It was dusk when he emerged, joining Vela and Auriga on the beach where they sat watching the waterline catch fire and turn to molten gold. Auriga was holding a large pink conch shell in her hands, murmuring into its spiral depths almost as if it were a radio and she was projecting her voice out into the sea, or into some distant storm riding the waves above it.

Vela held out her hand to Danny; he didn’t take it.

“How long will you keep me here?” he asked.

“Why? Do you have some wish to leave?”

“I wish not to end up like the men in the cave.”

They had been laid out there on slabs of stone: dozens and dozens of men, nothing more now than bleached and nameless bones. Remnants of their clothing clung to them like barnacles, mere tatters of faded threads on those who had lain there the longest. He saw bits of homespun and dyed wool, boiled leather worked with runes, velvet doublets and garnet rings on pale fingers. There was Royal Navy broadcloth, black Lycra, faded cotton imprinted with tropical designs, pieces of canvas deck shoes and plastic scuba masks. All around were piled the grave goods of men who’d ventured or been pulled by tempest into the wild Sargasso Sea: fishing line and oxygen tanks, sextants and gold doubloons, telescopes and GPS locators, pulsing out weak signals from a world no map could chart.

The men grinned at Danny, row after row of them, gold teeth winking in the gloom. As if they spoke to them without tongues: _Yes, yes, we too knew well their pleasures._

_And to this place have they brought us._

***

“The years of mortal men are brief,” Vela told him, “but they passed those they had in happiness. Well did we mourn them when we laid them to rest with the relics they brought hither to our blessed shore.”

“But not all have stayed until their final days,” Auriga added, placing the shell down upon the sand. “Those who wished very much to leave we kept for a time, then set on their way.”

“How long?” Danny asked, his eyes fixed on Vela. “How long before you’d let me leave, if I chose that?”

“Seven years,” she told him.

“Seven years.” Danny glanced at his boat, motionless on the still waters of the lagoon, and he shook his head. “You must think I'm stupid. Seven years and then I sail back to a land that looks nothing like the one I left. Or I step out on the sand and crumble into dust.”

Vela stood and went to him, pushing the straps of the tank top off his shoulders, passing the tips of all ten fingers over his skin, over the freckles that were the mirror of the stars that charted his fate. “I can read your future, but I cannot tell it to you,” she told him softly, “for such knowledge cannot belong to those who must live it. But I can give you possibilities. If you return, you may forgive those who have hurt you, or you may have revenge upon them. You may find peace and joy, or you may meet death at low tide. Those are your chances, Danny. Death will find you anywhere, but how will you live the years you have before it claims you? That is what you must decide.”

Could he trust them, Auriga with her secret ways, Vela with her clever, skillful tongue? Had those buccaneers and salvagers, sailors and surfers and fishermen, succumbed to natural causes, or had they been loved to death, drained of bliss until they were nothing but empty shells of bone, homes for hermit crabs?

As deaths went it didn’t seem so bad.

But he had debts to call in, punishments to mete out. John and Meg and Kevin. His mother to make face the error of her neglect, his father’s ghost to exorcise--

 _His father._ Danny stood in the surf and the sun sank and the stars emerged, and he realized with a tremor that he could no longer remember his father’s name.

The elder Rayburn. That pillar of society, that great man of the Keys…

Danny shrugged and his shoulder didn’t ache. He spread his empty hands out over the water.

And he let go.

He turned from his boat, from the far horizon, back to the strange women with their bare legs and full breasts and arms that wrapped around him like seaweed in the deep.

“I hope you both like mango salsa with your mahi mahi,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a much belated birthday present for ennaih, and it comes with many apologies for the long delay and many thanks for your friendship.


End file.
